Tagged With voice assistants

The Amazon Echo is pretty great at understanding your voice out of the box, but Alexa could always use a little help. If she gets a command wrong - or even if she gets it right - open up your Alexa app to give some feedback.

With the handful of new smartphones, voice assistants and accessories announced by Google yesterday, it makes sense to collect a few opinions before diving in and buying whatever your favourite search engine company announces. Sure, some products might look good on stage, but how do they hold up when you get your hands on them? There are surely a few reasons you'd want to drop $79 for a tiny Google Home, but could the $US399 ($512) Google Home Max be the voice assistant speaker for you? What about the Pixel 2 XL over its smaller companion, the Pixel 2? Should you even consider importing a Google Clips camera to record your mundane existence? Well, unsurprisingly, a lot of people already have thoughts on the subject. Below are the early reviews for the major new products and features announced this week.

Predicting the future is near impossible -- but that doesn‘t stop us all from having a red hot go. Human beings have been predicting the future since the beginning of history and the results range from the hilarious to the downright uncanny.

One thing all future predictions have in common: they‘re rooted in our current understanding of how the world works. It‘s difficult to escape that mindset. We have no idea how technology will evolve, so our ideas are connected to the technology of today.

Sometimes all I need in this crazy world is a brisk walk to clear my head and some good music bumping through my headphones. But when that simple pleasure is interrupted every morning by my partner issuing voice commands while I'm out of the house, silencing the music in my headphones, it can be a tad frustrating. It's especially irksome when the root cause is the multiple user preferences of my Google Home, a voice assistant that is there to, ostensibly, make my life a little easier.

One of the biggest limitations of Google Home, Google's voice-controlled speakerbot, was that it couldn't tell anyone apart so all your requests were centered on one Google account. But thanks to its latest update, now it can recognise up to six people.

The Amazon Echo is useful to have around the home. It can play podcasts, take reminders and notes, tell you the length of your commute, even control other appliances in your house. But it's unavailable in Australia, and importing it is an expensive proposition if you're not sure you'll use it. Good news though, you can make a fully-functional one using a Raspberry Pi.

Voice assistants are all the rage, but while Siri, Google Now, and Cortana are all super neat, when it comes to using them people seem mixed. So, we want to know, how to use your phone voice assistant?

I'm a huge fan of digital personal assistants and I have no qualms speaking to my phone in public to set calendar reminders using Google Voice Commands. Apparently not that many people are as shameless as I am, according to a recent study on consumer interactions with voice assistants on mobile devices.

Although you might associate Siri with Apple, that particular pocket assistant wasn't born in Cupertino. In fact, Siri was an independent app before its acquisition by Apple in 2010, and now its founders are back with a new and improved version, "Viv".

Android/iOS: Every major operating system these days comes with its own personal voice assistant, but most of them are stuck on a single platform. Hound, the assistant from SoundHound, is available in beta for Android and coming to iOS -- but Aussies will have to wait a while to enjoy it.